


i think i'm better when i'm with you

by daydise



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Compliant, Friendship, M/M, Pre-Relationship, dorky kuroo rights, this is me trying to manifest kuroo in the manga
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25088128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daydise/pseuds/daydise
Summary: Kuroo becomes synonymous with random facts, organic chemistry and somehow, the clench in Kei’s heart.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou & Tsukishima Kei, Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei
Comments: 6
Kudos: 117





	i think i'm better when i'm with you

It starts like this: with Ennoshita’s lips spread thin, the light in his eyes completely gone as both Tanaka and Nishinoya fail to grasp the concept of carboxylic acids, alcohols and esters. Kei happens to be walking past their table when Narita calls out, “Tsukishima! You gotta help Ennoshita out.”

The thing is, he likes Ennoshita, and the dead look in his eyes dredges out some pity he thought he didn’t have. 

He stops walking. “Why are you guys even tutoring? We’re at training camp. And it’s 7:30 am.”

Kinoshita scratches at his cheek. “Ah, us second years have a chemistry exam as soon as we get back.”

Ennoshita slowly turns his head to face him, and Kei will never admit the unease in his stomach when those dead eyes are pinned on him. He supposes it wouldn’t be wise to get on his future captain’s bad side, and settles in at their table. 

And so it begins.

“The functional group for carboxylic acids is a carboxyl group. C-O-O-H. Like this—and there’s a double bond between this carbon and oxygen.” Kei is pretty sure Tanaka’s soul has left his body and Nishinoya’s is about to follow. He pinches the bridge of his nose, calling his own soul back. 

“A carboxyl group. C-O-O-H. C-O-O-H,” Nishinoya repeats, the words fading out as he stares out the window thoughtfully. And now his soul is gone.

Kei is ready to call it quits when Nishinoya’s head snaps back, eyes alight with a weird intensity. “C-O-O-H, like cooh, like you’re blowing on something hot. Cooh! Cooh!” Nishinoya blows on his soup desperately, eyes still on Kei. He tries not to be disturbed by it. “And acids are hot! That’s why you want to blow on them! Cooh!”

Kei is not entirely sure what kind of face he’s making, but Narita seems to be getting a kick out of it. “...Yes. I guess so, Nishinoya-san.” He just wants this to be over. Them thinking acids are always hot is a problem for future Ennoshita. 

Tanaka’s eyes are slowly growing wider. Kei braces himself and, once again, wishes Yamaguchi would stop sleeping like a log so someone else would also suffer with him.

“Bro! And alcohols have O-H. Like oh. Ohhhh. Like, ‘Oh! I need a drink’.” 

“Ryuu!”

There’s a resounding high-five and Kei takes it as his cue to leave. 

“You know, Tsukishima. You’re not so bad, huh?”

“Yeah, Yuu. He’s kind of like a carboxylic acid. Like you kinda don’t wanna touch it at all. But…all he needs is a drink and then he’s nice.” Kei watches the cogs turn in Tanaka’s head, unimpressed. Ennoshita holds his breath. “Bro! He’s an ester. A nice smelling ester!”

Everyone present, minus Kei, bursts out in laughter. Even Ennoshita is laughing, and Kei decides that he likes him 5% less. Their cackling turns the attention of the entire dining hall to their table. Kageyama just looks confused, Hinata continues inhaling his food, Kuroo is looking at him kind of funny, and Bokuto is staring with wide eyes. Sawamura doesn’t even bat an eye. So it’s kind of a normal morning, except for Kuroo’s weird expression. Nonetheless, he is not red in the face. And he is not thinking about the fact that both Nishinoya and Tanaka called him hot indirectly. Or told him that he is nice smelling. Their tiny little pea brains have probably not even processed their own words yet.

Kei sends Ennoshita a Look. “Next time, I’m not taking pity on you.” 

Ennoshita calms down a little, tilting his head to look at him with a satisfied smile instead of succumbing to Kei’s stink face. What the hell. 

“But they’re not wrong, are they?”

It continues like this: with Kuroo somehow convinced that Kei has an interest in organic chemistry. He’s not entirely wrong, Kei supposes, since dinosaurs these days are just super compressed carbon that people use today to produce electricity to the detriment of the environment, but that’s another topic for later. 

They’re in the third gym. Everyone else had left for dinner, with Kuroo and Kei on cleanup duty. The doors are wide open, letting the cool, summer night breeze in. Kuroo seems to bask in it, like some kind of volleyball-slash-organic-chemistry-god.

“Hey, Tsukki.”

“Yes, Kuroo-san?” He’s too busy wiping the sweat from his face to notice the crinkles around Kuroo’s eyes, but he does notice the repressed excitement in his voice. 

“Did you know that ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, or EDTA for short, is used as a chelation agent in everything from detergents, food, rare minerals segregation to medicine?”

He slides his glasses back on and regards Kuroo. Who is still standing with his arms open, face tilted toward the ceiling. Who just pulled some weird acid fact out of his ass like it was nothing. Who is smiling instead of smirking his usual smirk. Which is slowly beginning to slide off his face. It kind of feels like Kei’s caught Kuroo naked in the locker room—vulnerable and now both parties are embarrassed. 

Kei knows he’s an asshole. But there’s a tug at his stomach that tells him that if he lets that smile fall off Kuroo’s face, he _really_ would be an asshole. And maybe he does find the fact a little interesting. Sue him.

“Huh, so a delinquent like you knows some fancy acids. Do you know any that would burn off that shitty hair of yours?”

Kuroo has always been weirdly good at reading him, despite their first proper conversation occurring only two days prior. Kei counts on this. 

Kuroo blinks, cocking his head to the side. His hair falls in the direct path of the breeze, and Kei sees both of Kuroo’s eyes clearly for the first time. It’s oddly disarming. Like if Hinata decided to dye his hair side-character-black. Or if Yamaguchi actually has no freckles and has been drawing them on every morning. Or like the giddy grin growing on Kuroo’s face right now. 

There’s a pimple or two on Kuroo’s forehead, and his left canine is sharper than his right.

Kei blinks.

The pimples are now tucked under Kuroo’s fringe and the child-like grin is gone, replaced with a closed-lipped smile. A content one. 

Kei is not entirely sure he saw what he saw. Not entirely sure the whole exchange was even real. 

Except, Kuroo starts listing acids that can dissolve hair whilst they’re taking down the volleyball net, continues once they're done packing up and somehow has even more to say when they’re walking side-by-side to the dining hall.

Kei can’t find it within himself to mind.

Bokuto’s snarling at him across the net, his expression a mixture of annoyance and pride. Kei’s just stuffed his spike, and Bokuto’s looking at him like he’s proud of him. Like he’s a challenge for a top 5 ace. 

_What more do you need than your pride?_

He glances at Yamaguchi, who’s beaming from the sidelines and looks like he wants to yell: “That’s my best friend!” 

Even the King looks impressed. 

Everyone is being dramatic, he decides. 

_If you experience that moment, you’ll be hooked on volleyball._

His forearms are still stinging, with blotches of red contrasting against his skin. Although it was a pretty satisfying block, he doesn’t know if it’s his moment. And if you’re unsure about it, then surely it couldn’t be?

But this is the one thing he knows: Akaashi’s smirk and “Nice kill!”, Bokuto’s pout and Kuroo’s lazy grin, feel just right. Volleyball may just be a club, and may or may not be worth the extra effort, but it can’t hurt to put a little more effort into both new and current friendships. Even fix old ones. 

Kei turns around and shoots Yamaguchi a wide smile, 100% teeth and crescent eyes. It’s the kind of smile Akiteru would kill to take a photo of.

Kei pretends he didn’t just break the entire team.

They’re on a watermelon break sponsored by Shinzen’s parent association. He’s sitting with Yamaguchi, watching Hinata puff out his chest with Nishinoya and Yaku like deformed birds.

“Hey Tsukki, do you have an extra napkin?”

He turns his head and looks down. There’s a pile of watermelon seeds on top of Yamaguchi’s napkin. Kei passes him his. 

“Thanks! Say, Tsukki. I haven’t seen you spit out the seeds…”

In his peripheral, there’s an approaching boy with a criminally bad case of bedhead and watermelon juice dribbling down his chin. Kei is momentarily distracted.

“Huh?”

“What do you do with the seeds?”

Kuroo comes to a stop in front of him, hand on hip. His tongue darts out, lapping up the juice and leaving a sheen across his lips. 

Kei feels his face twist. “Gross.” He pointedly goes back to eating his watermelon. 

“Now, now. That is no way to treat your elders.” 

“It’s only by two years, Kuroo-san.”

Kuroo waves him off. “Details.”

Kei turns his entire body to face Yamaguchi. “Anyway, I just swallow the seeds.”

He didn’t know that this was so unusual. There is squawking left and right. Apparently, everyone here is a bird. He files this fact away for later.

Yamaguchi’s about to say something, but Kuroo beats him to the punch. “Did you know that if you swallow a watermelon seed, it’ll start sprouting in your stomach?” There’s something like concern lining his voice. If Kei didn’t know that Kuroo says docosahexaenoic acid when referring to fish oil, and has extensive knowledge on solar power, he’d be inclined to believe it.

“Oh is that so. I will be careful.” Kei makes sure he takes a bite out of his watermelon where most of the seeds are concentrated. Kuroo watches in mock horror. Yamaguchi just laughs.

“If you just leave it, apparently it’ll puncture through your stomach.”

Kei hides the quirk of his lip with his watermelon, looking directly at Kuroo. “I didn’t know you cared, Kuroo-san. Can you recommend some weed killers?”

Something passes through Kuroo’s eyes, and then he’s biting into his watermelon, the shape of his mouth matching the curve of the fruit.

“Hey, Tsukki. Do you ever think about how dinosaurs ruled the Earth for like 150 million years? And then completely died out and now it's just us, some plants and cats. Because I think about that sometimes. We’ve only been here for 6 million years. I don’t think we could even survive for another 144 million.”

“Actually, they were around for 165 to 177 million years.”

“Correction. I don’t think we could even survive for another 159 to 171 million years.” Kei can hear the smile in his voice. He keeps his eyes on Lev’s approaching spike.

“You’re truly a wealth of knowledge, Kuroo-san.”

They block the ball. 

It’s when he’s sitting next to Kozume, eyes sliding over Kageyama choking and Akaashi passing him water to Kuroo grilling some meat by himself, that he realises.

That Kuroo isn’t really like endless-energy-Hinata or loud-as-fuck-and-occasionally-astute-Bokuto. That Kuroo always thinks about what he says before he says it. That sometimes Kuroo is strangely quiet and stares at nothing at all. That he’s considerate and tries to hide it behind his fringe and smarmy smirks. That he never really rambles, and rarely talks about himself. Prefers to let others speak before him. But when he does speak, it usually carries some weight. There's purpose. 

Except for when it comes to organic chemistry, Kei supposes. Or other weirdly specific topics. Or when he’s with Bokuto.

“Huh.”

“You know, he wouldn’t be my best friend if he were like the other jock types.”

Kei startles, almost dropping the onigiri that’s halfway to his mouth. Kozume is still tapping away at his PSP, the faint sounds of a gun reloading filling the now slightly uncomfortable silence. Kozume’s nonchalance makes it seem like it’s only weird on Kei’s end, so he tries to feel less uncomfortable. It doesn’t work. 

Kozume speaks again. “He cares, you know?”

Kei thinks about afternoon apologies on top of grassy hills, motivational speeches when the sun’s just set and blocking tips with the rising moon. Thinks about that and the ethics of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid and growing watermelons in your stomach. Thinks about it some more, and then it’s almost like he’s manifested Kuroo out of nowhere.

“Tsukki! You need to eat more! Here.” Kuroo carefully piles meat onto his plate. There’s something lodged in his throat as he watches him transfer the meat, keeping the burnt ones for himself. Maybe it’s because Kozume’s just pointed out that _Kuroo cares_ that he accepts it—the food, the advice, the friendship, the prick of warmth in his chest, all of it. Kei retaliates with a half-hearted “Don’t call me that”, more for the routine of it than anything.

It’s like the nickname is a beacon for Bokuto and Sawamura to descend on him, and he barely manages to ward them off, escaping with two extra onigiris and a grilled corn.

“Oi, Kenma! You too!” 

Kozume deflates beside him, the sound of ‘Game Over’ drifting through the air for the first time as he hands the PSP to Kuroo. It’s a little ominous and does not at all match the dumb smile cut onto Kuroo’s lips, his stupid rolled up t-shirt sleeves, or the soft pink he has across his cheeks when Kei looks up at him. 

Kei raises his eyebrows at Kozume, who rolls his eyes in return. 

It’s an understanding.

It ends like this: with three new contacts, a drive to see Kuroo across the net one more time, and a text already lighting up his phone.

>> _did u know that perovskite solar cells hold the potential to undercut fossil fuels and revolutionise the energy market???_

<< _Those crystals discovered 200 years ago? Tell me more about it, Kuroo-san._

**Author's Note:**

> thank you reddit and science daily for these Kuroo Approved Facts. tsukki may be slightly oc here but to that i say sped up character development ie. still a little shit but now cares slightly more. and to reiterate: kuroo nerd kuroo nerd kuroo nerd


End file.
